Trans charity swayed kids’ medical referrals

Secret documents have shown the UK’s trans charity Mermaids has had a direct line to the NHS to override doctors who refused to refer children who were unsure about their gender.

A trans charity has been advising the NHS on children with questions on their gender and doctors who refused to refer them.

Britain’s controversial trans charity Mermaids had a direct line to the National Health Service to override medical doctors who refused to refer children troubled by their biological sex, secret documents have shown.

The NHS clinic, Tavistock, which is under a review following a public backlash for prescribing hormone blockers to children who wanted to change their gender, was forced to produce the documents after initially claiming it didn’t have them.

Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reported Tavistock claimed it didn’t have emails or minutes of meetings with the Mermaid charity chairwoman Susie Green. It was only when the information regulator threatened court action that more than 330 pages were released. The documents show that Ms Green, a trans lobbyist who took her 16-year-old son to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery to become a trans woman called Jackie, demanded to Tavistock that she be considered a “professional” to be able to refer other children to Tavistock when their medical doctors had refused.

Tavistock would consider referrals from “professionals” such as schools or other medical services.

Ms Green, who has no known formal medical training, had a direct line to Dr Polly Carmichael, Tavistock’s director and a clinical psychologist, the documents show. In one case Ms Green referred a person whose doctor had “repeatedly refused to refer’’.

The revelation that a trans lobby group has had such influence on underage referrals, as well as being advisers on two of the Tavistock clinic’s studies into gender identity, have caused an uproar across England.

Ms Green even helped draft NHS protocol for treating children, including how “hormone blockers will now be considered for any children under 12”.

In 2011, the Tavistock clinic lowered the age at which young people could access puberty blockers from 16 to 12 as part of a research protocol.

Tavistock firstly refused to release the documents, which relate to meetings between 2014 and 2018, relying on an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act of creating “disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress”.

The Telegraph said when the Information Commissioner’s Office asked them to justify that refusal, the trust withdrew it and said that following “an extensive search of emails … the trust does not hold the requested information”.

The ICO threatened High Court action because it believed on the balance of probabilities Tavistock did hold the information, and the organisation then produced 322 pages of documents.